Learn about alternatives to Coupa software available from some Coupa software competitors in our 2024 comprehensive guide. We also explain in depth how Tipalti stacks up against Coupa.
Coupa Alternatives and Competitors
This section highlights several Coupa competitors, with more emphasis on Tipalti vs. Coupa following this section. Besides AP automation, some of these competitors are also Coupa alternatives for procurement software that may include strategic sourcing. Tipalti offers PO management, AP automation, Expenses, and Mass Payments software that helps your company achieve its spend control goals from procure-to-pay.
Tipalti
G2 rating:
Tipalti is a user-friendly AP automation platform, integrating with your ERP or accounting software, that eliminates 80% of the workload spent on managing global supplier payment operations. The holistic cloud system offers virtual payment services, supplier onboarding, tax compliance, invoice data capture for invoice management and invoice processing, and more.
The Tipalti platform prioritises efficiency and helps companies deliver a global white-label experience for onboarding, supplier management, and status communications through a Supplier Portal. Businesses looking to scale finance and operations trust Tipalti to provide a complete and global B2B payables automation solution.
Top Features
- Built-in OCR with touchless invoice processing.
- 3-way or 2-way invoice matching.
- Intelligent routing of approvals.
- Payment methods, entities, currencies, subsidiaries, and geographies are combined and reconciled in real-time.
- Eliminate financial and compliance risks with VAT ID tax compliance, audit trails, approval workflows, and role-based views.
Serviceable Market
Companies with high volume and complex AP operations across various business verticals from software to eCommerce, manufacturing, online services, tech, gaming, gig economy, and marketplaces.
Strengths
- Global, performance-based platform for marketplaces, networks, and communities.
- Reduce your payment error rates against 26,000 rules.
- End-to-end, invoice-based supplier payments designed for growing companies.
- AI-driven analytics for business intelligence and decision-making.
- Outstanding customer support, with a 98% customer satisfaction rating.
Pricing
Pricing is custom and varies based on business needs, processing requirements, and the volume of users.
Tipalti Starter and Tipalti Pro are the two plans offered.
- Tipalti Starter has straightforward payment capabilities for small business owners.
- Tipalti Pro is for medium and enterprise companies with multi-entity payables and international tax IDs.
Basware
G2 rating:
Basware provides high and medium-end cloud AP automation software using artificial intelligence/machine learning for touchless invoice processing from receipt to payment. Basware is ideal for large global companies and finance shared service centres.
Top Features
- For invoice matching, allows POs, goods receipts, quality checks, or contracts, and uses recognition methods to view available data for best matching with missing information.
- Meets tax compliance regulations in over 50 countries.
- KPIs and process inefficiency insights with suggestions to improve.
Serviceable Market
Basware is used by large corporations with over 50 thousand invoices processed per year. Basware also provides an AP automation software solution for mid-market companies with a lower number of invoices processed.
Strengths
- 100% accuracy rate for invoice capture using SmartPDF technology.
- High invoice match rate.
- Automated tax code handling and tax calculations.
- Automate non-PO invoices with custom spend plans, AI coding, and approval workflows.
Pricing
Basware pricing is by custom quote depending on business needs, with pricing by functionalities needed, business volume, and customisation needs.
Esker
G2 rating:
Esker is a leader in cloud-based AI-driven process automation solutions for source-to-pay, order-to-cash, and global E-Invoicing. Esker’s software products include eSourcing by Market Dojo for e-procurement, accounts payable, expenses, accounts receivable, and the customer service function. The following features relate to accounts payable automation.
Top Features
- Gets accurate and quick invoice data capture with machine learning and deep learning for invoices received by mail, email, fax, or EDI.
- Provides a supplier portal for onboarding and status.
- Automates invoice processing and approvals workflow, including 3-way matching and auto approval of invoices with no exceptions for global payments.
- Uses AI-driven predictive invoice coding by GL account, tax code, cost type, and cost centre.
- Provides real-time dashboards with KPIs and other metrics for accounts payable visibility.
- Allows multi-ERP integration for users with multiple systems.
Serviceable Market
Large and medium-sized companies seeking a comprehensive solution for automating the cash conversion cycle.
Strengths
- Ability to receive supplier invoices in several different ways.
- Allows integration with multiple ERP systems.
- Feature set includes supplier statement matching and dynamic discounting.
Pricing
Pricing is available by custom quote.
Medius
G2 rating:
Medius is a market leader in AI/ML/OCR-powered digital invoice processing for accounts payable automation. Its integrated software products include Medius AP Automation and Medius Pay for paying suppliers. The cloud-based spend management platform helps companies go paperless and touchless for the entire invoice-to-pay cycle. Medius also offers software modules for Procurement, Sourcing, and Contract Management that centralises documents.
Top Features
- Digital invoice capture.
- 3-way matching with purchase orders and receipts.
- Anomaly and fraud detection for risk management.
- Audit trail.
- Dashboards with KPIs.
Serviceable Market
Companies of all sizes in a wide range of industries use Medius for AP automation and payments.
Strengths
- ERP connector partnerships with ERP system consultants.
- Pending vs. paid spend management visibility and KPIs.
- Uses AI and machine learning.
Pricing
Quote-based pricing. Medius offers a range of pricing plans with increasing features, including Starter (for startups and small businesses), Professional, Enterprise, and Premium. If using Medius Pay in addition to AP Automation, unlimited number of suppliers are included in each plan; otherwise the number of suppliers is limited. Medius pricing is based on users, fixed invoice volume ranges, countries, and payment accounts.
Lightyear
G2 rating:
Lightyear intelligent AP automation software streamlines accounts payable processes. This Coupa alternative software provider also offers Lightyear Purchasing software.
Top Features
- Uploads invoices and bills to extract data.
- Flags duplicate invoices.
- Performs 3-way matching.
- Automatically extracts Inventory data to your inventory software and price checks inventory.
- Includes multi-tier approvals.
- Reconciles supplier statements.
- Provides foreign currency conversion.
Serviceable Market
Best for small businesses and mid-market companies looking for inventory management integration.
Strengths
- Manage 100% of invoices electronically, reducing processing time by up to 80%.
- Get inventory invoice price checking vs. supplier pricing data and immediately transfer inventory data on the invoice to integrated inventory software.
Pricing
Lightyear SaaS pricing (with a 1-month free trial) starts from £89 per month for 100 credits. Lightyear includes unlimited pages at no extra cost, unlimited users and sub-entities, and has no installation fees.
Coupa vs Tipalti
What does Tipalti do?
Tipalti is a PO management, AP automation, Expenses, and Mass Payments software provider. Tipalti supports all phases of the payables management workflow in one cloud platform. It’s a top Coupa alternative worth considering.
Tipalti Product Capabilities Overview
Tipalti addresses everything from PO management, supplier onboarding, and vetting to tax and regulatory compliance, digitising invoices, invoice processing, 2&3-way PO matching, intelligent approval workflows, and payments to suppliers. Tipalti supports various payment methods in 196 countries and in 120 currencies, supplier payment status communications, real-time payment reconciliation, and reporting.
Tipalti also offers advanced global AP capabilities, such as early payments, multi-entity AP, Multi-FX, and FX-hedging. Tipalti integrates with all major ERPs and accounting systems, syncing with subsidiary GL, ensuring payables information is up to date, and accelerating financial close by more than 25%.
What does Coupa do?
G2 rating:
Coupa is a business spend management (BSM) and procurement software platform that includes supply chain management software. Their solutions include suites of applications covering different areas of spend, procurement, expense management, sourcing, and inventory management. Besides its flagship procurement platform, Coupa also has AP automation capabilities, including supplier payments and invoice management.
End-to-End AP Automation: Tipalti vs Coupa
Tipalti offers end-to-end accounts payable automation, beginning with self-service supplier onboarding and tax compliance through an online supplier portal that’s white labelled so your brand takes centre stage with suppliers.
At the end of the AP automation cycle, Tipalti’s global payments capabilities kick in to pay approved invoices. You’ll have a choice of multiple payment methods to 196 countries, in 120 available currencies. Tipalti makes cross-border payments with advanced foreign exchange (FX) features like hedging. With Tipalti Detect, Tipalti also offers AI-based fraud detection to help prevent your company from paying bad actors. All payables data is synced in real-time with your ERP or accounting software, including automated payment reconciliation. This makes reporting easy with Tipalti.
Tipalti is an all-in-one provider and regulated holder of a Money Transmitter Licence in U.S, states and regulated in the UK. Tipalti Europe Ltd is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority as an Electronic Money Institution under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011. Therefore, Tipalti software users don’t need to obtain and implement other partnerships outside Tipalti to facilitate payments, as they would with Coupa. That’s a significant advantage of Tipalti.
Invoice Management: Tipalti vs Coupa
Tipalti enables a touchless invoice processing workflow with machine learning (ML) powered OCR technology that captures the header and line-level details. 2-way and 3-way PO matching allows automated syncing of POs and GRNs from your ERP (or from Tipalti’s PO management solution) to Tipalti in order to complete the PO match flow, helping eliminate overspending and strengthen financial controls. Tipalti’s PO management functionality helps your company achieve greater optimisation of spend under compliance at a much lower cost than Coupa.
Coupa’s software focuses on procurement and e-invoicing using XML, PO flip or manual entry by suppliers in its portal. Coupa also does 2-way or 3-way invoice matching. Coupa’s machine learning-based solution for emailed invoices isn’t a strong solution for the following reasons.
Coupa’s Invoice Smash OCR option for emailed invoices:
- Costs extra money
- Has limits to what it can read
- Takes a long time to learn & self-correct
Tipalti does not make suppliers change their behaviours by requiring them to submit their invoices via a portal. Invoice submission via the portal is one way to submit invoices with Tipalti but suppliers can continue to submit invoices via email. The success of Coupa relies on e-invoicing adoption rates, which are dependant on the bargaining power of the payer. For example, Asda has the power to enforce manual invoice entry, whereas smaller companies can expect to receive more emailed PDF invoices.
Supplier Onboarding & Support: Tipalti vs Coupa
With Tipalti AP automation, your business gets all-in-one supplier onboarding and management. Tipalti’s payer-branded portal for self-service supplier onboarding includes guided digital tax forms for tax compliance and the collection of a supplier’s preferred payment method information. Tipalti validates supplier payment data automatically using 26 thousand global banking rules.
Coupa also provides a self-service supplier onboarding solution. But it doesn’t offer a payer-branded supplier portal. Unlike Tipalti, Coupa does not validate supplier data automatically either.
Coupa’s focus is on spend management functionality, including PO management and a supplier network providing supplier matches for purchasing. Coupa also offers AI-driven spend analytics via Coupa Community Insight.
Future Strategic Direction & Roadmap: Tipalti vs Coupa
Tipalti’s Finance Operations vision and its ability to execute on its roadmap means that customers will continue to enjoy new and enhanced product features that meet their current and future needs. Tipalti has over 300 product experts that work across different solution areas. Every year, Tipalti releases over 170 product features and improvements. Tipalti’s world-class global operations team (with over 200+ members) will get your business up and running on Tipalti quickly, train, advise, respond to and support your organisation.
Tipalti has a tried and tested methodology to ensure fast speed to market with minimal disruption so your business can realise the value of our platform sooner. We’ve established that expertise from our experience serving thousands of highly-satisfied customers. Our customers are vital to our success, as evidenced by our industry-leading 98% Customer Satisfaction score and 99% retention ratings.
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought Coupa on February 28, 2023, taking the company private. As described in this Forbes article, the question is whether the Coupa acquisition will be a precursor to cost-cutting. Cost-cutting might result in a diminished user experience and customer value. Will thought leaders & executives impacting the company’s future strategic direction depart the company post-acquisition?
Consider Coupa Competitors for AP automation.
Tipalti end-to-end AP automation eliminates manual data entry and improves financial controls and compliance for a lower price than Coupa.
Features of Tipalti vs. Coupa
Although Coupa and Tipalti both help companies automate their accounts payable processes, each platform incorporates different features and solutions for finance teams. Here’s a look at some of the differences between Tipalti and Coupa.
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| *Limited functionality | ||
| Global Payments | Paying to 196 countries in 120 currencies with six different payment methods and 26k rules to reduce payment errors. Money Transmitter Licences in US and UK regulation | Coupa Pay with comparable payment capability but no MTL and no payment validation rules |
| PO Management | Integrated PO and payables solution, helping streamline company purchases, improve spend controls, and reduce AP processing time. Integrated with Slack to accelerate approvals | PO creation, no Slack integration to accelerate approvals |
| Touchless Invoice Processing & PO-Matching | OCR (Header and line level scan and capture), Machine Learning, Managed services; 2&3-way PO-Matching
| Comparable capability |
| Supplier Onboarding and Vetting | Effortlessly onboard vendors with a client-branded portal, preferred payment method, currency, and payment thresholds. 26K+ rules validate payments, screen against global sanction lists | Onboarding through Coupa network but no 26k payment validation rules
|
| Multi-Entity Payable Reconciliation | Manage multiple entities in a single instance with a consolidated view; instant reconciliation across entities and payables workflows
| Can have multiple entities but cannot configure entity-level branding and tax workflow.
|
| Tax Compliance | KPMG approved tax engine; collect and validate VAT tax ID and compare to VAT ID on invoices. Collect data and produce DAC7 preparation reports. Validates against 3,000+ rules | Collect tax forms but no tax validation rules |
| FX Solutions | Currency conversions without the complications – save time and money on currency conversions. Also, advanced FX solutions – intercompany bank transfers, FX hedging, payee FX
| No FX solutions
|
| Early Payments/Rebates | Payees can get paid earlier than their due date without any change to the AP process or impacting your working capital
| Supply chain finance & Accelerate product |
| ERP Integraptions | Native API integrations with major ERPs (NetSuite, Intacct, QuickBooks Online & Xero). Integration with all other ERPs via pre-built connectors using no-code, drag-and-drop interface
| Comparable
|
Knowing Which Solution is Best for Your Business
Selecting an AP Automation solution that fits your business’ needs is an important choice, especially for growing teams needing a solution that can scale with their business. Your business may also need specific features such as international payment capabilities, Multi-FX, Multi-Entity, or tax and regulatory compliance. Evaluate these feature differences to help make your decision.
When to Choose Tipalti?
You are running a hyper-growth business, whether you are scaling domestically or expanding internationally
If you run a hyper-growth business, whether scaling rapidly domestically or expanding internationally, you need a payable solution with built-in scalability to help future-proof your payable operations. As your company grows, your AP workflow complexities increase, including paying global suppliers, handling multi-subsidiary business payables, and processing a growing amount of payments. You also need to offer a wide range of localised payment methods to pay your domestic and global suppliers in their preferred payment methods and local currencies.
Tipalti’s end-to-end accounts payable platform future-proofs your payables operations, so you don’t need to keep investing more resources as you grow. Tipalti’s Multi-Entity capability enables payers to manage a large number of entities within the same instance of Tipalti, enabling centralised controls and financial reporting.
Tipalti’s advanced capabilities include KPMG-approved tax capability for IRS compliance and collecting, validating, matching, and maintaining VAT IDs. Tipalti collects data and produces DAC7 preparation reports.
While Coupa has limited international payout capability, Tipalti can execute fast global payments to 196 countries in 120 currencies, supporting multiple international payment methods—global ACH, wire transfer, PayPal, and prepaid debit card. You can also streamline your FX conversion workflow with advanced FX capabilities such as Multi-FX, FX hedging, and Payee FX optimisation.
You want to automate your entire workflow and accelerate financial close
Accounts payable processing comes with many potential inefficiencies that increase the workload of your AP team. As manual operations increase in complexity, they can slow down the financial close process.
Tipalti makes AP processes invisible. By cutting out 80% of manual payables workload, you can align your resources to focus on mission-critical activities instead of back-office financial operations. Tipalti enables a complete touchless invoice processing workflow with machine learning (ML) powered OCR technology that captures the header and line-level details. 2-way and 3-way PO matching allow automated syncing of POs and GDRs from your ERP to Tipalti in order to complete the PO match flow, helping eliminate overspending and strengthen financial controls.
Tipalti also helps streamline the supplier onboarding process with a self-service, white-labelled portal, enabling faster, more accurate payee data collection and verification. Provide visibility into payment status via a 24/7 multi-language partner portal and proactive automatic payment status emails. Tipalti automatically validates supplier payment data in real-time using 26,000 global banking rules to eliminate payment errors proactively.
You can accelerate financial close by more than 25% as payment methods, currencies, subsidiaries, and geographies are combined and reconciled in real-time for instant visibility. Detailed transaction and reconciliation reports are integrated with your ERP system, providing a consolidated view of all payable accounts.
You want to strengthen compliance and controls and reduce tax fraud and audit risk
Since AP involves direct access to cash reserves, it’s critical to institute proper controls and governance. Tax compliance is another crucial aspect, as manually collecting and validating tax forms from suppliers is fraught with legal and financial risk.
Tipalti provides granular controls over payables and payment operations to increase the security of sensitive financial data, ensure ongoing sanctions list compliance, and improve management oversight of key AP processes. Tipalti enables you to strengthen control with built-in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, constantly improving the performance of invoice approval routing with the ability to incorporate Fixed Approval Roles.
Tipalti solves the complex and manual process of collecting tax information via digital capture during the onboarding flow, ensuring information is validated before payment is even processed. Help ensure VAT ID, DAC7, and IRS tax compliance for payers.
When to Choose Coupa?
You are a large enterprise with a sizable tech budget
Coupa is a solution primarily for large enterprises looking to solve a procurement problem that have sizable technology budgets. If you are a midmarket company, Coupa can be cost-prohibitive as the pricing model is designed for larger enterprises. Midmarket companies might find Coupa’s solution too complex as it is suited more for large enterprise companies with a dedicated procurement team. As primarily a procurement solution, Coupa is a fit for slower-growth large enterprises where growth is every bit as important as just cost controls.
In contrast, Tipalti’s pricing model is ideal for midmarket companies. Pricing starts at £119 per month for the platform fee. As your business gets more complex, you can upgrade to Tipalti’s more advanced capabilities, such as W-8 tax forms, international tax IDs, or multi-entity payables.
Tipalti’s solution is ideal for midmarket companies to pursue cost controls while growing and scaling efficiently. Eliminate the manual workload spent managing payables while avoiding AP hiring and focusing finance on high-value initiatives. As companies add more invoices, payments, global suppliers, subsidiaries, costs, and audit controls, Tipalti is built to easily and rapidly handle changing needs without requiring more resources.
Your organisation has the bandwidth to support the time and resource-intensive implementation
It can take 8-12 months to implement and go live with Coupa. Many resources are required to be involved in the implementation process, including project managers, IT, procurement, and finance. Also, implementing Coupa requires significant change management initiatives and company-wide training because of the number of end-users needed for procurement, sourcing, and inventory solutions. If your priority is to automate AP instead of the overall procurement process, you still have to wait for the lengthy implementation effort to be completed.
In contrast, Tipalti has a proven track record of getting customers live in as little as two weeks. The “white glove” implementation service provides customers with dedicated implementation, customer success, and supplier enablement experts that ensure a successful and scalable payables setup and a stable and accurate ERP sync.
You are looking for a procurement solution, and you are OK with managing some AP workflows manually
Coupa is primarily a procurement solution designed for large enterprises. It is suitable for large businesses to manage their procurement process, but some AP automation capabilities are unavailable. So your business needs to manage them manually or add several other solutions to round up the AP cycle.
For the supplier payment workflow, Coupa launched “Coupa Pay” in 2018, but it still has a relatively low adoption rate within its customer base. Also, Coupa doesn’t have its own payment rails, relying on integrations with PayPal, TransferMate, and banks for card payments, creating complexity and unpredictability.
Coupa Pay offers limited cross-border payments capabilities and has no advanced FX solutions such as Multi-FX and FX hedging.
Lastly, Coupa has limited tax compliance capabilities. They collect tax forms but do not offer tax rules validation to help ensure VAT ID, DAC7, and IRS compliance. You need to manage the vendor tax compliance process outside of Coupa.
Tipalti Customer Testimonials
Tipalti streamlined international payments and compliance. As we continue to acquire companies, we can maximise these investments without compromising scalability or needing new approaches or technology.
Phil Newell | Director of Finance IT, GoDaddy
Vendors can easily set up their preferred payment method and have all their documents in one place. Tipalti documents the approvals through an easy workflow and completely consolidates reconciliations.
Nancy Spencer | VP of Finance, Aceable
Tipalti has allowed us to make quick and significant process improvements and has enabled us to improve our payment timing. Tipalti also elevated our financial reporting process, and we’ve shaved two days off of our month-end close process.
Andrew Cole | Senior Accounting Manager, Uptake
Conclusion
Include Coupa competitors when your business prepares its software evaluation for decision-making. The best unified finance automation solution with ERP integration may include AP automation, advanced FX solutions, mass payments, employee expenses, and procurement.
Using Tipalti automation software will provide cost savings, efficiency, advanced FX, and tax compliance features for your global, multi-entity business that Coupa may lack. SaaS pricing for Tipalti is at a lower price point than Coupa. Request a demo for Tipalti finance automation products.
